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A Church. A Shelter. Is It Safe?

WEST 36TH Metropolitan Community Church houses a shelter.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

HARD by the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, on one of the last ungentrified blocks of Midtown Manhattan, Metropolitan Community Church sits sandwiched between neighbors with pull-down metal gates, its front doors looking almost like the entrance to a loading dock.

The church and its senior pastor, the Rev. Pat Bumgardner, have been acclaimed for creating a welcoming house of worship for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and, especially, for initiating programs that reach out to homeless L.G.B.T. young people.

Sylvia’s Place, one of three shelters in the city that focus on that population, has been operating out of the church’s lower level since 2003. The shelter’s work was one of the reasons Ms. Bumgardner was chosen as co-grand marshal of this year’s Manhattan L.G.B.T. Pride March.

But interviews with homeless teenagers who have stayed at Sylvia’s Place, and with operators of other shelters for young gay people, paint a picture of the shelter as dirty, overcrowded and unsafe, with as many as 30 occupants sleeping in a space originally occupied by only 6.

Lacking cots, clients would routinely sleep on the floor, and fights were common. Sylvia’s Place denies the allegations and says it is offering emergency shelter that no one else offers. But however good the shelter’s intentions, its critics say, it is endangering an already vulnerable population.

Anthony Alonzi’s story is typical. After coming out as gay to his family, Mr. Alonzi said, he was kicked out of his home in New Jersey. In March, after months sleeping on friends’ couches, he arrived in Times Square. He was 18. The police referred him to Sylvia’s Place.

In an interview, he said he could immediately tell “it was not very sanitary.”

“They were going to give me a blanket to sleep on the concrete floor,” Mr. Alonzi said. But from other residents, he said, he “was hearing stories of there being rats crawling around on the floor.” Disturbed, Mr. Alonzi elected to spend the night on the street.

Kourtney Washington, a college student who moved on to a transitional apartment run by the Ali Forney Center, one of the two other organizations that provide shelter to homeless gay young people in the city, said that earlier this year he made it through just one night at Sylvia’s.

“People who had been there longer had seniority, and they had cots,” he said. “The people who didn’t, slept on the used and abused sheets, that had God-knows-what on them.”

“Fortunately,” he said, “I got really cool with one of the ladies. She let me sit in her chair all night, so I didn’t have to sleep on the floor.”

Another client, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to alienate the shelter’s administrators, said life at Sylvia’s could be so chaotic that he would “sneak out some nights and go to Bellevue,” one of the city’s most notorious adult homeless shelters, “just to get some sleep.”

The issues at Sylvia’s Place go beyond the feelings of a few clients and include basic standards of safety. The church building, at 446 West 36th Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues, is not certified for occupancy as either a church or a shelter by the Department of Buildings, according to Jennifer Gilbert, a department spokeswoman.

Recent inspection by the Fire Department found that sprinklers had not been tested and that exits had not been properly marked, Frank Dwyer, a Fire Department spokesman, said.

Carl Siciliano, executive director of the Forney Center, described Sylvia’s Place as “a disaster waiting to happen.” (The Forney Center was founded in the same space at the Metropolitan Community Church that Sylvia’s Place now occupies.)

“When kids are made to sleep on the concrete floor, in a space without windows, surrounded by boxes and whatever, the message is ‘You’re trash. You can be treated just like the trash,’ ” he said.

Mr. Siciliano was so concerned about conditions at Sylvia’s Place that in July 2010, he and Theresa Nolan, the New York City division director of Green Chimneys, another transitional living program for L.G.B.T. youths, alerted the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development and the state’s Office of Children and Family Services about conditions there.

After more than a year, the two agencies inspected the shelter two weeks ago; that inspection came only after a reporter’s series of telephone inquiries stretching over many months.

Pat Cantiello, a spokeswoman for the state agency, said in an e-mail message that the agency “will continue to have conversations with Sylvia’s Place about what kind of license/certification (if any) is required, and will be working with them on a resolution.”

Ms. Bumgardner did not comment, but William Morán-Berberena, the executive director of the Metropolitan Community Church’s charity programs, and Frances Wood, an administrator, did agree to an interview. Sylvia’s Place, they said, is safe and clean, emphasizing the point that the shelter offers immediate assistance, unlike other shelters with long waiting lists. The Forney Center has almost 200 names on its waiting list to get housing.

The Forney Center was the city’s first shelter specifically for this population, founded by Mr. Siciliano at the Metropolitan Community Church in the summer of 2002 with six beds. Mr. Siciliano said he had always known that the church building “was a temporary space” for the shelter.

In January 2003, the center moved to new headquarters, from which it administers 27 beds in emergency shelter apartments and 30 beds in transitional-living apartments all over the city.

In its place at the Metropolitan Community Church, Ms. Bumgardner established Sylvia’s Place, named for Sylvia Rivera, a transgender campaigner and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, who started a food pantry at the church. She died of liver cancer shortly before the shelter opened.

In July 2005, the New York City Council awarded $400,000 in grants to Sylvia’s Place, the Forney Center and Green Chimneys. The grants, administered by the Department of Youth and Community Development, were given with the understanding that the recipients would eventually become licensed shelters under state regulations, which require organizations to provide sleeping facilities for youths in a homelike environment, follow strict standards for fire safety, limit the number of people sleeping in each room and, in a regulation created for heterosexual clients, provide separate sleeping quarters for male and female residents.

While the Forney Center and Green Chimneys became licensed within a couple of years, Sylvia’s never did.

Mr. Morán-Berberena declined to discuss the decision not to move forward with licensing, beyond saying that the “decision we made was to favor the program instead of investing more money that was required for us to invest.”

Councilman Lewis A. Fidler, the chairman of the Youth Services Committee of the Council, said he had no regrets about the grant that Sylvia’s Place received, though he described it as a “crash pad” for homeless youth.

“Sylvia’s Place fills a valuable need. I do believe the kids there are much better off than if they were staying on the street, freezing and being exploited,” he said.

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Entering the Metropolitan Community Church building, worshipers go to the left and up a flight of stairs to the sanctuary. Those going to Sylvia’s Place and the church’s food pantry walk to the right and through a metal cage. Though only slightly below street level, the large room feels like a basement. The concrete floor and metal cage give the feeling of being confined, and exposed pipes and fluorescent lights add to a subterranean effect. Behind a partition, there is an industrial kitchen.

Pictures taken by a former counselor at Sylvia’s and published in 2008 on the City Room blog of The New York Times showed the room to be chaotic and cluttered, with young men and women sleeping on the floor.

Photo

Theresa Nolan, the New York City division director of Green Chimneys, a transitional living program for L.G.B.T. youths.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Mr. Morán-Berberena said recently that conditions were “totally different” from when the pictures were taken and that on any given night 11 to 16 people stay at the shelter, each one on a cot.

But on an unbearably hot Friday night in July, a group of gay and transgender teenagers were hanging out on the sidewalk in front of Sylvia’s Place at about 10 p.m. Traffic streaming into the Lincoln Tunnel created a cacophony of horns and blasts of car exhaust.

The doors were wide open for anyone to enter. Inside, food was being prepared in the kitchen at the rear of the room, making the shelter even hotter.

On that night, the room was orderly but filled with boxes and furniture, and the cots for the evening had not yet been laid out; about 15 of them were folded against one wall.

There were no windows to the outside, and the only visible exit was the front door.

Mr. Morán-Berberena said of the shelter: “Our kids have a place to sleep. It’s clean. It’s legal. It’s been inspected by many offices, and many departments of the city.”

But Sylvia’s Place falls into a gray area. If it had become licensed as a shelter, as intended by the original City Council grant, it would have had to meet the state agency’s standards. Since it had not been, the agency did not enforce its regulations there.

Similarly, a church can get some relief from the requirement in the New York City building code that any room used for sleeping must have a window, but the church is operating without a certificate of occupancy as either a homeless shelter or a church. Ms. Gilbert, the Buildings Department spokeswoman, said the building’s certificate of occupancy is for a “storage, showroom or office space.” Beyond Mr. Morán-Berberena’s comments, no one at Sylvia’s Place responded to repeated requests for comment about the certificate of occupancy or whether the building met fire-safety requirements.

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Young people move fluidly among all three L.G.B.T. homeless-youth programs, and after hearing stories from Sylvia’s Place that made them fear for their clients’ safety, said Mr. Siciliano and Ms. Nolan, the Green Chimneys official, they e-mailed their concerns to Ms. Bumgardner and Mr. Morán-Berberena in May 2010.

They wrote that they were “distressed by the environmental conditions at Sylvia’s Place,” which they described as “degrading, hazardous and illegal,” and “substantially out of compliance with the basic standards for safe and humane youth shelter established by the federal government.”

Ms. Bumgardner did not take up their offer to meet with them and discuss their concerns, nor did her e-mailed response address any of the charges directly.

Unsatisfied with the response, Mr. Siciliano and Ms. Nolan notified the city and state agencies — the Department of Youth and Community Development, and the Office of Children and Family Services.

Photo

Anthony Alonzi says that the police referred him to Sylvia's Place, a Midtown shelter for L.G.B.T. young people, but that because of conditions there he quickly left, choosing to sleep in the streets. He was photographed, in his bedroom at another shelter, Green Chimneys.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Mr. Siciliano said they spoke with Susan Haskell, then the assistant commissioner of the Department of Youth and Community Development, who he said had indicated that the agency “told Sylvia’s to cease and desist after they had failed to obtain a license,” but that it was up to the state agency “to enforce the laws regarding homeless youth shelters.”

More than a year passed with no action. Ms. Haskell left the city agency last summer. Then, after a reporter’s repeated calls seeking comment, government agencies suddenly took notice of Sylvia’s Place.

On Oct. 21, the Fire Department issued a notice of violation for not having the proper inspections in place for the sprinkler system.

“We need a third-party company to come and test the sprinkler system,” said Mr. Dwyer, the Fire Department spokesman. He also said that lighting and exit signs were missing and that the shelter had been told it must add them. Inspectors from both the city and state agencies showed up at Sylvia’s Place four days later. A spokeswoman for the state Office of Children’s Services, Elizabeth McCabe, said the purpose was to “see what was going on there” and to “work with Reverend Pat to get them licensed.”

Ms. McCabe said she was not sure why it had taken so long for the agency to conduct its inspection, but noted, “We don’t want to see more young people on the street.”

That, however, was happening. A young man who was at Sylvia’s Place on the night of the inspection, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order not to alienate the shelter’s administrators, said that on previous nights, 20 or 30 people were sleeping there, though there were only “about five cots, and about six pillows” for them.

After the agencies showed up, he said, Sylvia’s staff allowed only six clients to stay the night. He said he voluntarily left with friends and went to Zuccotti Park, where he spent the rainy night with Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The next day, he was grim about the prospect of having to sleep outdoors again. “It’s my birthday,” he said, “and I was hoping my friends and I could rent a motel room or something, so I could just sleep inside on my birthday.”

Mr. Siciliano said that the homelessness of young L.G.B.T. people stands in stark contrast to recent gay-rights successes like the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the passage of the same-sex marriage bill in New York.

Though he called attention to the conditions at Sylvia’s Place, he said that they paled in comparison to the much bigger problem he saw facing homeless youth in New York: “The utter negligence by the city and the state.”

He recently began a Campaign for Youth Shelter that calls upon the government to finance an additional 100 shelter beds every year, at an annual cost of $3 million, until there are enough shelter beds for all homeless youths.

From the Green Chimneys office in the South Bronx, Ms. Nolan acknowledged the conundrum that Sylvia’s Place faces. “It’s really hard to find space. I understand that,” she said. Still, she maintains, “it’s important to find the right space that’s safe, appropriate and healthy” for housing anyone — “even if they’re homeless, even if they’re gay.”

Correction: December 4, 2011

An article in some editions on Nov. 6 about Sylvia’s Place, a shelter in Manhattan that focuses on homeless young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, misstated the shelter’s location in the Metropolitan Community Church building. It is at street level, not “down a couple of steps.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2011, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Church. A Shelter. Is It Safe?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe